Vikas Bidarimath (May 1, 2018)
on Flipkart
I was in the market for a thin and light Windows laptop with a similar form factor and performance as my MBP. I must say that this laptop comes pretty close to delivering the perfect WIndows experience. It is the experience every Windows user should get. These are my thoughts after using it for a little over a month:
Things I love about this laptop:
- Its beautiful amazing light and sleek form factor.
- Snappy performance, needless to say, given the configuration. The processor and SSD both make up for a very quick boot time of about 4 seconds.
- Full HD widescreen. I love the fact that you can customize it to different resolutions that suit your needs. There is an entire list. There are few laptops out there that provide such a wide range of resolutions for their display.
- Smooth accurate glass touchpad. Supports multi-finger gestures.
- Speakers are some of the best i have heard on a laptop. To get the best sound output, laptop has to be placed on a flat surface, like a table.
- The comfortable keyboard and the feeling of a smooth glass trackpad. Moreover, the keyboard backlight can be adjusted from low to high through 3 levels.
- Smooth curves all over the body and no sharp edges.
- HD webcam - This is made available starting this model only. Any asus models below this price point and you get only VGA webcam.
- 80% screen to body ratio i.e. thinner bezels - this provides a more immersive experience.
- A steady battery life in spite of being so thin and light. With my day-to-day usage as described above, I get 5-6 hours. Note that i am using laptop speakers for music which consume more power. If I plug in earphones, I get 7-8 hours easily and with a bit of conservative use, I can squeeze in a whole work day without plugging it in. Agreed that today?s laptops are expected to give 8-10 hours but with this form factor, I feel this is more than enough for me.
- Minimum heating. So far, in day-to-day usage, I have not seen the machine heating up that much. Even though it is peak summer, I can comfortably keep it going on my lap (there is no air conditioning in my home).
Nice-to-have things: these things really make you feel like you are getting the money?s worth and appreciate both the product and manufacturing company.
- A nice quality laptop sleeve comes inside the box. It is really thoughtful of Asus to include this accessory and I appreciate this the most.
- A USB to Ethernet adaptor for LAN connectivity.
- A USB-C to HDMI adaptor for display connectivity.
- Small and light-weight charger, easy to carry around. The downside to this is that there is no fast-charging available.
- Fingerprint scanner to login. Works 100% of the time for me.
- Cloud storage space on Dropbox and Asus for free. I feel this is important in today?s tech since we prefer SSDs with limited storage and with everything moving towards cloud storage.
- McAfee security software trial version
- MS-Office trial version.
Though last 2 are not fully licensed software, they help you get started and be productive right off the bat as soon as the machine is setup. Of course, you will need to purchase the full versions.
Things that can be better:
- The initial updates took up 2 hours for setting up my machine after I unboxed it. One should not have to wait that long to get one?s hands on a new gadget after unboxing it. Windows is to blame for this.
- It comes with glossy lid. This lid catches fingerprints, no doubt it is beautiful. Just need to keep it clean.
- Screen wobbles, just a tad bit.
- I just wish the trackpad buttons were a little softer to click. They are quite stiff.
- Sometimes screen becomes washed out as soon as I switch from a dark background to a white background. I have seen this in other laptops too with Matte screen displays.
- I could do with a little less bloatware installed on this laptop, out of the box.
- It takes about 2.5 - 3 hours to charge fully. Fast charging capability to at least 50% would be nice.
- The laptop gets hot while charging. During this time, it is not a good idea to place it on the lap.
This laptop is for:
- Business users who travel a lot and are looking to get office work done.
- Creative users (Artists) looking to get photo/video editing or music/movie creation done.
- Multimedia users looking to consume audio/video content on the internet.
- Home users looking for general browsing, audio/video calls, emails.
It might be a little far-fetched for the latter 2 use cases since there are other devices with lesser prices . This is NOT a Gaming laptop.
I can guarantee that this machine will serve you well at least for the next 4-5 years, whatever your use-case. And once you get used to this form factor, you will hate going back to those chunky large machines.
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